So much junk in the news; either inane Kim K or God-awful terrorism mixed up with a government that....well, what is there to say that hasn't been said. Seems like there is not much in between.
In moving around some yesterday to the Big Apple, I happened upon some talk show commentary about education and that we had schools that still insisted on offering liberal arts courses for which, of course, there are no jobs that the commentators felt were either modern or worthwhile.
In the course of my advertising life, which resembled an endless succession of meetings, there was ample time for small talk; water cooler stuff. One of my mentors, fellow name Perlie, (Bob Perlstein of SFM Media) was very old school. He spoke Latin and Greek because when you went to school when he did, that was part of the deal. His lesson to me was that at some key time when you are meeting with someone who you don't know very well if at all, you dropped in a phrase in Latin, for instance: "si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit".
If the fellow's eyes glazed over and he looked dumb as a rock, then you had him. You knew you knew something, some body of language perhaps, that was not in his backpack.
I took a slightly different twist having a music background. I would leave the FM radio on and sometime, at a needed time, would sit back and say something like "Ya' know, no matter how stressful the day, just hearing this piece gives me some calm...is there some piece that does it for you"?
Obviously dirty pool. I was thinking about it yesterday during the "education" talk and came up with the simply premise that what we lack or is lacking is just those certain bits of learning and appreciation that add color to who we are. We are, generally, pretty bland at times with not much interest either to offer or knocking around in our brains.
So think about the ballet positions above - surely you all have kids who take dance - and note what follows. Black and white to color with years of work in between.